The brother has become an outlaw and we never found peace in our souls.
Stáhnout obrázek
Božena Jenšovská, née Strolená, was born on 28th July, 1929 in Knínice near Boskovice to a butchers´ family and had a year and a half older brother Vladimír. At the beginning of 1931, the family moved to Prague to the proletarian district of Žižkov, where the father set up small butchers. Mom stayed at home. In 1949 Vladimír Strolený attended a political meeting at the Faculty of Law, for which he was excluded from the studies along with other signatories. He studied high technical school. One year later got arrested by the state police, and during a political process he was first sentenced to death and later to 25 years in jail. As a result his sister Božena got expelled from the College of Chemistry and Technology. However, she got accepted to the Charles University to study at the Faculty of Physics. In 1952 Vladimir managed to escape from the Ilava prison in Slovakia, where his sister Božena brought him stuff to survive. He hid at his Prague friends. His family, despite being persecuted by the state police, was able to obtain false documents and a group in the borderland, where he worked under a false identity and waited for the opportunity to cross the border. The family only heard of him in 1958 from Munich. He stayed in Germany, where he worked as a freelance editor of the Free Europe until retirement. He died in Germany in 2015.
